Marble Hornets Requests & Other Stuff

⚠️❗ Stigmata ❗⚠️

At first, it had been easy to ignore.

Adam felt a vague, distant, fuzzy uncertainty when it came to Rosswood Park. He had assumed that this was merely his human nature warning him against entering where so many before him had become lost.

It was cold, as well. Not just in Rosswood; he started wearing a hoodie while he sat in the hotel room with Dave, despite the heating system being turned on. It didn't bother him, as he was used to this.

He had begun coughing around a day after making the trip to Rosswood for the first time and walking around it trying to get some b-roll for his documentary. This could be easily explained away as flu, and he had just been unlucky this year. Nothing some Tylenol bought at the local CVS wouldn't take care of.

It wasn't until that night in Rosswood - the night that he had decided to sneak out of his hotel room and off into the woods to film some of the park at night - that he really paid attention to what was wrong. Because, in Adam's experience, collapsing to the ground in a coughing fit before passing out and then having the most terrifying fever dream ever, and waking up with very limited memory of even entering the forest in the first place? Yeah, that wasn't what he considered normal.

His cameraman had sounded (rightfully) concerned when Adam had told him this, but otherwise offered nothing that could be of any use to him.

Even this, Adam had reasoned, could just be the same thing that had happened to everyone else who entered Rosswood. He wanted to believe that it was indeed just some side effect of background radiation or climate or something.

However, as he started losing time, and, more often than he used to, his temper, his blood turned to ice when he considered that there may be something much more sinister at play.

He was a few days into filming the documentary, and following an argument they had the previous day, Dave had decided that it would be best if he and Adam had separate hotel rooms. He was not bothered by this development at all, because now he had the opportunity to try something.

He asked to keep the handheld camera in his room, and bought several packs of tapes to use. He set the camera up on a table across the room, facing towards the door, and then gone about his day as normal.

Adam had drifted into an uneasy, nightmare-filled sleep, but had suddenly awoken from a noise in the room with him. It seemed to have come from right beside his head, and he quickly turned over to flick the bedside light on.

His breathing was fast and shallow as he struggled to remember what had been chasing him in his dream, when he noticed that the lock on the door was undone. The door itself was closed, however it still disturbed Adam to think of why it had come undone after he had so carefully ensured that it had been locked.

The time on the bedside radio alarm clock silently flickered "2:07 AM", and Adam sighed, rubbing one eye with the heel of his palm. He used his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his brow, but then looked down in shock at the grey fabric. Blood.

He was bleeding. He didn't know where from, and he was not in any pain at all, but the fact that there had been blood on his face was not one that he thought he should just brush off.

Still, as of now, it was 2:08 in the morning, and he doubted that anyone he called at this time wouldn't be impressed, especially as he wasn't in any way injured. He got out of bed, room still illuminated by nothing other than the bedside lamp, and set about locking the door again and splashing water on his face to remove the blood and sweat that was sticking to his hair.

The blood (as he had suspected) was not from a wound of any kind, and encircled his head in a ring of the red liquid. Adam stared at himself, much more afraid than he would ever admit, even to himself.

The red light on the camera still set up on the table blinked, as if it understood that it was about to witness something absolutely horrible. After all, history repeats itself.